


Rust and Light

by nwhepcat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Grief, SPN 5.10, Slash-goggle friendly, episode coda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-21
Updated: 2010-02-21
Packaged: 2017-10-07 10:50:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/64423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nwhepcat/pseuds/nwhepcat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For once it's Castiel urging Dean to release his iron grip on his feelings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rust and Light

Bobby is drunker than shit. Sam has been trying to get him to slow down, worried about the damage he's doing to an already injured body. Bobby's made it clear, though, that damage is going to be done, one way or the other, booze or violence.

Dean has tried to get shit-faced, he really has, but the effort to lift a bottle or glass to his lips is more than he can manage right now. Huffing out a breath, he pushes himself to his feet and blunders outside. It's cold, and Dean can feel the coming snowstorm in his bones, his sinuses, the pressure of the air. He clumps down to the end of the porch, unzips and aims a stream of piss at the ground below. So maybe he's drunker than he thought, but it's not enough. Will never be enough.

He thinks about sitting on the porch steps, but when he turns to do so, he's reminded that the stairs are covered over with Bobby's wheelchair ramp. Sonofabitching life this is. It shatters you when it draws you inside, then does everything it can to grind the pieces into dust.

Dean weaves his way down the ramp and climbs into the Impala, getting behind the wheel.

"You are in no condition to drive," Castiel intones from the passenger seat, and Dean is glad that he already pissed.

"Jesus, dude! A little warning." That doesn't provoke an apology, which would have been stupid to hope for anyway. "I wasn't planning to drive anywhere. I came out here to be alone," he says pointedly.

As usual, Castiel's hint-receptors are offline. "You are grieving."

"No shit, Sherlock. That's some powerful angel mojo you've got if you figured that out so fast."

"I am sorry about Ellen and Jo. I know they were very important to you, and I understand why."

Dean's hand clenches the steering wheel, his ring biting painfully into the flesh. "Oh yeah? What do you understand?"

"They were, in a sense, your garrison-mates. They suffered their own griefs and learned to carry on. They fought bravely against the darkness. They lightened your burdens by being who they were."

_Garrison-mates._ The phrasing rocks him back. "Is that how it was with the angels you fought beside?"

There's a pause before Castiel answers. "Not precisely. I cannot pretend to know exactly what you are feeling, and I won't insult you by trying. We are not human. What we are to one another is different." Another pause, not quite as long. "I have, for example, never played Slugbug with one of my comrades."

As shitty as he feels, Dean can't hold back a startled laugh. "Slugbug?"

"Jo introduced me to this game on our way to Carthage." He rubs at his arm just below the shoulder. "She had quite a gift for slugging."

Dean twitches a smile. "I can believe it." For some reason, this piece of knowledge and the picture it conjures, makes his eyes burn with unshed tears.

"There is no shame in grieving for the fallen," Castiel says softly.

"No, but it's a luxury. We fucked up, made their sacrifice pointless. We have to get past this, decide our next move."

"And how is drinking more productive than weeping?"

"Fuck you!" Dean snarls. He launches himself out of the car and back through the maze of wrecks piled on one another in the salvage yard. He wishes to hell he had grabbed a tire iron out of the trunk first. There's nothing he wants more than to pound something into scrap.

"You are wrong," Castiel says from immediately behind him.

Dean whirls, hands tightening into fists. "Yeah, I got that. You can fuck off now."

Castiel does not fuck off. "Grief is not a luxury. It is necessary. For angels as well as men, although we experience and express it in different ways."

"What do you mean, necessary?"

"To close off sorrow is to risk closing off all feeling."

Dean's eyes narrow. "Anna said you don't feel anything."

Castiel doesn't move or make a sound, yet Dean has the strong impression of a deep sigh. "If she used those words, it was a gross simplification. We do not lack emotion. We are different beings, and our emotions are different. I believe what she meant was our way was no longer enough for her."

Dean settles his ass against the bashed-in fender of an Oldsmobile. "This is what she wanted? The pain you feel when your parents are slaughtered? When the fuckers tear apart the few friends you have left?"

"She chose this, yes."

"She was stupid."

"There are many who agree with you."

Knowing the dicks who wanted her dead agree with his sullen statement makes him regret it. "What happened to her?"

This time Castiel does sigh. "I don't know. I did not have my superiors' trust even then."

"Do you grieve for her?"

Castiel nods. "I miss what we once had, and I fear for her. I feel -- guilty. This is not an angelic emotion."

Dean looks off to the side, taking in the wreckage around him. "You're tainted, buddy. Uriel warned you not to hang with our kind."

Castiel's voice sounds hoarse and oddly choked as he responds, "Well, as you would say, fuck him."

"Cas! You sing your daddy's praises with that mouth?"

"Fortunately no." It's not easy to tell in the shadows cast by the harsh security light, but Cas looks faintly embarrassed, yet vaguely pleased with himself. "I will make a pact with you."

"A pact?"

"Let your grief find a voice. I promise you, it's not weakness but strength. In return, I will let you observe as I mourn for Ellen and Jo in my own way -- you cannot gaze upon me directly, it's too dangerous. But you can observe much as humans watch an eclipse with a shoebox pierced by a pinprick."

"Dude, humans don't just mourn on command." At least he doesn't.

"There's very little humans do on command, I've noticed." Castiel's tone is wry -- an inflection Dean didn't even know he could produce. He perches on the hood of the Olds, facing south to Dean's east. "Just ... talk to me about them."

"Why are you pushing this on me?" Dean demands.

"These feelings are in you. I only urge you to let them out."

He tears at a hangnail with his teeth, a savage satisfaction surging through him at the pain and the welling of blood. "I don't even know what I'm feeling, all right? It's so tangled and complicated that I might never sort it out. Ellen was ... she was hard to pin down. Tough and tender, and sort of hot, angry as hell at me and Sammy, because our dad had a lot to do with her husband dying. I used to think she was the polar opposite of my mom, and then when you showed me ... I found out she wasn't. I wish I'd kept up with her and Jo, but everything got so damn messed up. I can't even be glad we reconnected, because if we hadn't, the two of 'em would be alive right now."

"They chose to join the fight, and chose to make their stand as they did. Ellen and Jo were warriors, just as you and Sam are. You are not to blame."

Dean looks up at the sky, feeling the first pinpoint flakes of snow settle on his face. "Hellhounds, Cas. Jesus. To see Jo --" He closes his eyes, concentrates on breathing. "When she first went out to hunt, I felt like -- I treated her like -- she was some sort of baby duckling who imprinted on a wolf." He breathes in, breathes out. "Fuck."

Castiel reaches across the distance he's maintained and puts a hand on Dean's shoulder, just as he did after revealing the deal his Mom had made.

Dean shrugs it off, pushes away from the Olds, facing the wall of junkers, not Castiel. "Don't. I will never let this shit go, any of it, because once I start --" He lifts his arms and lets them drop in a gesture of finality, heading back toward the house.

He's no more than halfway up the ramp when he hears the same ear-splitting multi-tonal whine he heard just after he clawed his way out of the grave. Dean whirls, hands clapped over his ears. If Cas blows out Bobby's windows and a hundred windshields or more, Bobby will kick Dean's ass, legs or no legs.

Before the sound shatters anything, glass or eardrums, it changes. It swells and soars, vibrating in Dean's feet, his throat, his breastbone. It's almost like music, but no kind of music he's ever heard before. Dean's not sure he finds it beautiful -- it's so far outside of beauty, beyond it, that the concept doesn't apply.

Castiel is nowhere in sight, but there's a growing light from deep within the maze of old wrecks. It pulses and shifts like the Northern lights, blazing through a honeycomb of car windows.

Behind him Dean hears the squeak of the screen door and the clatter of Bobby's chair over the threshold, followed by Sam's footsteps.

"The hell?" murmurs Bobby.

"It's Cas," Dean says. "This is what the angels do when a brother falls. In battle, I mean." His words sound faint, distracted, even to him.

"An angel --?" Sam starts to say, but loses the thread in the seductive pull of the sound and shimmer.

"Not this time. It's for Jo and Ellen."

Words fall away as they watch the junkyard become an eerie city of rust and light, as they let the sound surround them and fill them. Dean tears his gaze away just long enough to look back at Sam and Bobby, as silent and rapt as if they are standing in the scorching heat of a hunter's pyre. Carefully Dean shuffles backwards up the ramp, keeping his eyes on the light show.

He bumps up against something warm and pliant: Sam's hand on his back, extended to guide him to a halt. Sam settles both hands on Dean's shoulders as they take in Castiel's tribute. It's been a long time since Dean felt like they were on the same page about anything, much less something as slippery as feelings. Been a long time since he felt this connected to Sam.

It's hard to say how long they stand there -- or sit, in Bobby's case. When the light finally fades and the sound dies away, Dean's fingers are tight and swollen with cold, though he hasn't felt it all this time.

The three of them blink at one another like they've just come out of a trance -- and maybe they have.

"I don't know about you boys," Bobby says, sober now, all the rough edges sanded off his voice for the first time since Dean has known him. "But I'm going to hit the hay. We've got a Plan B to cook up in the morning."

"Right behind you," Dean says, but his feet are rooted to the spot.

Sam too, apparently. The only movement he makes is the minute increase in pressure of his hands on Dean's shoulders.

The screen squeaks and slaps behind Bobby, and Dean draws in a breath that feels like the first he's taken in more than twenty years. The air tastes different now, cold and achingly pure. Something else that he can't define. If someone pressed him to at this moment, he'd say some asshole thing like "Rainbows and unicorns," and he's grateful for the silence.

After a long while, Sam drops his hands and says quietly, "See you upstairs," retreating into Bobby's house without waiting for a response.

Dean stands in the stillness, breathing it in, watching the snow drift down in the halo of the security light.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Cadenza (The Rusty Light Remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/186972) by [dreamlittleyo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamlittleyo/pseuds/dreamlittleyo)




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